Let's celebrate the infinite and very serious playfulness of nature. We rather crudely tend to refer to Darwinian evolution by the dreary metaphor, "survival of the fittest." It's more like survival of the survivor, which may not necessarily be the fittest.

But it's really survival of the most playful, in the long term. Individuals and species most finely tuned to their niche, who stick closest to local community standards, are the most vulnerable to not surviving. Those with the largest repertoire of biologic possibilities and behaviors available to them survive when the niche changes. As it always does.

Those who can do it only one way are stuck.

In human terms, this is the problem with all ideologies, all varieties of mono-culture societies, all rigid adaptations and orthodoxies. Short term, conservative is the most comfortable.

But nature is promiscuous, playful, keeping its options open.

Scientists have recently been working on determining the minimum number of genes necessary for life. It appears to be a very small number, compared with the gene complement of even the simplest organism. So, what's all that extra stuff for?

From bacteria to Homo sapiens, in what we used to arrogantly call the great chain of being, there is all this extra DNA — collected from everything from prior virus infections and swap encounters to the wonderful mixing of genes of sexual dimorphism. Most of the genetic complement of every organism (including us) appears to be unused. It seems to be occasionally expressed and available, just in case the niche changes.

Societies where the conservatives and moralists have won, with no tolerance for deviance and diversity, are finding themselves threatened. This is essentially what we mean by "fundamentalist." Individuals, species, societies and churches that don't keep a reservoir of promiscuity grow rigid and die.

"We've always done it that way," is a sure-fire recipe for obsolescence.

Oh, I'll admit that the diverse, deviate, promiscuous ones are often an inconvenient nuisance. But they are our reservoir of options.

I am amused by people who wish to get rid of all families except working papa, housewife mama and 2.3 children, all of whom are, as Garrison Keillor says, above average. Even if they are right that this is the objectively "best" family model, you can't get there from here except by genocide.

In selecting mates, if the prospect has to match all 10 of your preferred criteria, you're in trouble. Most of us settle for six or eight out of 10. This injection of diversity and surprise often stretches us — usually a good thing.

Having more than one employment skill is similarly a good thing. It's that reservoir of options again.

Life is deviate, devious, and diverse; it is promiscuous and playful. And it is too serious an endeavor for the usual sort of seriousness we tend to bring to it. We might well all lighten up, though our preferences be occasionally violated and our familiar cherished values often offended. It is how life grows.

The Rev. Mike Young is the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.